Long Time Passing

by Linda Crew

Outspoken individualist Kathy is out of step with most girls at her Oregon high school. What's Kathy doing stuck in her small town when so much is happening in the world--Vietnam protests, civil rights battles, free love, kids running away to be hippies in Haight-Ashbury? She may be stuck, but she's determined to start living her real life now, and to find her one true talent and her true love.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published September 8, 1997

About the author

My early books were for young readers, and perhaps my best-known is my first, Children of the River. Set against the backdrop of the Cambodian refugee crisis of 1979, it’s still used in schools and English-as-a-second-language classes across the country twenty-seven years since publication. My two most recent—Brides of Eden: a True Story Imagined and A Heart for Any Fate: Westward to Oregon 1845—were published as cross-over titles, and I suspect have been read by more adults than teenagers.

With my new book, I have had to take a completely different turn. When I inadvertently became addicted to both Oxycodone and Xanax after undergoing total knee replacement surgery, there was suddenly no material more compelling to me than my own survival and healing. And when I realized the extent to which the problem of addiction to prescription drugs was affecting people all across the nation, I knew I needed to speak up and be at least one of the people telling this story. If the sharing of my pharmaceutically-induced trainwreck can comfort somebody else or, even better, help save them from heading down this horrible path in the first place, it will help me feel that perhaps some good can come of my past four years.